I never thought I’d be shocked to see a counterfeit item, having browsed the wares of illicit street vendors everywhere from New York to Shanghai. But I was indeed amazed by what I encountered when I toured Southeast Asia earlier this summer: Bogus replicas of the Bose SoundLink Mini Bluetooth speaker clogged every market I visited in Singapore, Thailand, and Cambodia.

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Considering that the SoundLink Mini II is one of our current picks for the best portable Bluetooth speaker—a model so good, I bought the review sample even though I already have more than a dozen Bluetooth speakers—I couldn’t contain my curiosity. The fakes were as obvious as a cheap toupee, but I wondered how bad they could be, especially at a typical US-equivalent price of $12 to $15. That’s about 1/15 the cost of a real SoundLink Mini II. We’ve struggled to find recommendable speakers at that price. Could one of these bogus Boses really be a viable alternative to our favorite budget Bluetooth speakers?

The clerk at one of the stalls in Bangkok’s sprawling Fortune Town IT Mall immediately sized me up. When I asked the price of a phony SoundLink Mini, she insisted, “Oh, no, you want quality!” and attempted to step me up to a counterfeit JBL Charge selling for the equivalent of about $30. Happy that I impressed her as a discerning shopper but determined to buy the Bose, I picked one up for 450 Thai baht, or about $13.

(Incidentally, it isn’t illegal for US citizens to buy counterfeit items, but it is illegal to sell them.)

I could tell at a glance the speaker I’d bought was a counterfeit. Bose offers the real thing only in dark gray, while the counterfeit is blue. (Advantage: counterfeit.) While the genuine article has its jacks on the side, the one from the stall has jacks on the back. The fake adds a microSD card slot apparently intended for playing MP3s. (Advantage: counterfeit.) The knockoff also sports a USB Type-A jack, about whose function I can only speculate. Regardless, I could have told the difference even wearing a blindfold, because the real SoundLink Mini II is 77 percent heavier. (Advantage: counterfeit.)

Both the counterfeit (left) and the real SoundLink Mini II (right) have a 3.5 mm audio input jack and a Micro-USB charging jack, but the fake adds a TF (microSD) card slot and a USB Type-A jack.

When I tried mating the fake SoundLink Mini with my Samsung Galaxy S6, I got another surprise: an actual voice prompt coaching me through the process. Not bad for $13! Even better, the prompt was a female voice in heavily accented English. (Advantage: counterfeit.)

Things were looking bad for my SoundLink Mini II until I put the bogus Bose up against the $5,000 worth of test equipment I use for speaker reviews in audio-enthusiast publications. When I measured both speakers’ frequency response—the evenness with which audio gear reproduces various frequencies of sound—I noticed a difference. Ideally, a speaker’s response plot looks like a fairly flat line extending from the lowest bass notes up to the highest treble tones. That means no tones come across as emphasized or muted, and the sound is at least reasonably natural and full.

Frequency response of the Bose SoundLink Mini II (blue trace), the counterfeit (red trace), and the Cambridge SoundWorks OontZ Angle 3 (green trace). The flatter and longer the line, the better the sound.

The real SoundLink Mini II produced a surprisingly flat response for a small Bluetooth speaker, with a bass range that extended down into the lowest notes of a cello. But the counterfeit had no bass at all—it could barely play the lowest note on a flute! It didn’t have much treble response, either, which meant that you wouldn’t be able to hear much of a singer’s whisper, a flutist’s breath, or a cymbal’s ring.

Of course, it’s no surprise that a $200 speaker beats a $13 speaker. I then wanted to find out how the counterfeit compared with other speakers in its price range, but every similarly priced Bluetooth speaker I had on hand lacked an audio input I could use for measurements. I did have a $30 speaker I could try, though: the Cambridge SoundWorks OontZ Angle 3. And as you can see in the graph above, the measurements of the OontZ Angle 3 easily outclassed those of the counterfeit Bose. So not only is the counterfeit no substitute for the real thing, it isn’t even impressive for its price.

The sound distorted terribly, almost as if a tiny gnome had kicked in the speaker cones.

Even after having measured the response of thousands of audio devices, I’m still reluctant to judge any item entirely by the graphs, so I sat down for a long listen to compare the counterfeit against the genuine article. It didn’t turn out to be a long listen, though.

I think the counterfeit might be the worst of the 200-plus wireless speakers I’ve heard. The sound was incredibly raspy and rough; even the smooth-voiced singer Holly Cole sounded like she had the flu. When I turned up the volume to play Mötley Crüe’s “Kickstart My Heart,” the sound distorted terribly, almost as if a tiny gnome had kicked in the speaker cones. Turning the volume back down didn’t improve the sound at all.

After a few more tunes, I started to think I’d had enough, but the speaker itself quit before I could turn it off, even though I’d been running it only long enough to do the measurements and to play a dozen or so of my favorite test tracks. I charged it back up and put it through the same battery-life test I do for all of our top picks. A mere 90 minutes later, the battery died. The shortest battery life I’d previously encountered in a portable Bluetooth speaker was five hours.

Even though the bogus Bose is an illegal device, produced in violation of intellectual-property laws, it feels unfair to judge such a speaker from my comfy living room in Southern California. It wasn’t made for me. It was really made for people in developing countries who would probably love to have a real SoundLink Mini II but who might never be able to save up $200 for one.

But even if your budget is under $20, you have much better options, such as the AmazonBasics Nano, which sounds pretty nice yet is much smaller—and splash-resistant, too. So if you find yourself in an exotic locale, facing piles of Bluetooth speakers at prices too good to be true … go for the wooden frog instead.

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